


A Worthy Challenge

by sullypants



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:00:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27559468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: Veronica is new to Riverdale, but she finds fitting in easy—with one notable, redheaded exception.
Relationships: Cheryl Blossom/Veronica Lodge
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	A Worthy Challenge

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Riverdale Pride and Joy Zine, the PDF version of which [can still be purchased](https://gumroad.com/riverdalepridezine). All proceeds go to the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN), and the zine contains a number of (extremely excellent) stories and artworks that cannot be found elsewhere.
> 
> I'm sharing this story here in hopes that it might lead you to seek out the zine, and because the world needs more Cheryl/Veronica fic. 
> 
> Sincere thanks and affection to singsongsung for her thoughtful editing insights and suggestions.

  
  
  


She can win this town, Veronica thinks.

Veronica—daughter of the Upper West Side, doyenne of the Spence set, queen bee of any social gathering—can handle a hick town in the middle-of-nowhere-upstate.

She was glad when her father decided to take a step back from his businesses, to try easing slowly into retirement.

She was _not_ delighted, however, to know that this life change would involve leaving her city, her only home, and relocating to this provincial backwater that for all its faults, still somehow birthed her parents.

Still—she’s a Lodge. Lodges make hay while the sun shines.

Veronica loves a challenge. 

  
  
  


Her first conquest is easy as pie, and nearly as sweet—or so Veronica thinks; this girl might have a sharper bite than her words suggest.

Betty Cooper is a golden girl, ponytail high on her head and Converse on her bouncing feet. She leads Veronica through a tour of Riverdale High, in all its very retro, sock-hop, and necking-at-the-Point glory. 

When Betty swings her arm widely to convey the majesty (read: dustiness) of the science corridor— _whack_ —she nearly takes out a walking blur of crimson.

“Watch it, Barbie!” 

Veronica barely gets a peek at the girl Betty almost clotheslined, before she’s gone in a gleaming wave of copper-red hair.

(Veronica feels a rush of unexpected relief; there must be a half-decent salon in this town after all.)

The redhead whips around the far corner at the end of the corridor before Veronica realizes Betty is yelling after them.

“—deadline, Cheryl! ‘Blossoms always keep their word,’ so you claim!” Betty sighs, and Veronica stares. Betty’s frustrated face breaks out into a wide and somewhat uncanny smile. “That’s my cousin, she owes me a quote,” she informs Veronica with a fond shrug. “She's a bit of a maniac.”

Veronica nods noncommittally. _Don’t provoke the natives_ , she thinks. 

Betty’s eyes gleam very suddenly. “Want to check out the newspaper office? You can meet my boyfriend.”

  
  
  


Betty’s boyfriend is a quiet guy with a slouch, a funny hat, and a wary look in his eye as he shakes Veronica’s hand. 

Jughead is a trickier sell than Betty—until Veronica notices how that same eye widens in delight when he sees his girlfriend, and then a smile suddenly transforms his face when said girlfriend mentions something called _Pop’s_. 

  
  
  


Pop’s, it transpires, is a chock’lit shop. 

The way to Jughead Jones’s heart is through his stomach. 

Veronica buys a thank-you-for-welcoming-me-to-Riverdale round of burgers for the table, and she’s suddenly two-for-two.

And she meets Kevin. He saunters into the diner, narrows in on whatever is new and shiny in the place—her, of course—and suddenly they’re a quartet, and she’s sharing a plate of fries and getting the lay of the gossip-related landscape courtesy of Kevin Keller, all while Betty and Jughead get cosy on their side of the booth.

Three-for-three, just like that. 

  
  
  


She almost misses it, but as she’s leaving the diner arm-in-arm with Kevin, she glimpses a cherry red Cadillac bombing its way out of the parking lot, heading north. 

  
  
  


At school, Kevin introduces her to his boyfriend Moose, and when Moose invites her to join them at a party that Saturday (“Clayton’s annual start-of-school rager,” as he calls it), she agrees. _It’s an opportunity_ , she tells herself. 

It’s there that Veronica finally gets another glimpse of red hair—but it’s much shorter this time, almost a crew cut. 

His name is Archie and he’s a bit of a flirt. He’s apparently Betty’s next door neighbor and Jughead’s best friend ( _this town_ is _small_ , she muses.)

He also seems to have the coordination of a puppy—he accidentally takes out the entire beer pong table when he turns to get her a drink.

“Andrews!” comes the exasperated chorus of the football team, and Archie’s face turns a beet-red that, upon consideration, does not clash too horribly with his hair.

Still—when she next sees him with his arm over the shoulder of someone Betty introduces as Val, her ego is far from bruised. There’s already a sturdy-looking gent who calls himself Reggie Mantle trying to chat her up, and she’s thoroughly amused at his endearingly oafish efforts. 

She seems to have met everyone worth knowing, in nearly one fell swoop. Not bad for her first week.

  
  
  


It’s not until the following week at Riverdale High that Veronica witnesses that initial scarlet mane once more, and she realizes has indeed not quite yet met everyone worth knowing in Riverdale. 

To her surprise, that hair goes arm-in-arm with yet another redhead ( _what’s a group of redheads called?_ she wonders. _A rash? What’s in the water here?_ ), a boy of such ghostly complexion that Veronica can’t help but notice the contrast to the girl beside him—who stalks through the hall like she owns the place and gives off the fiery glow of pure belonging. 

“Kevin, who’s that?”

Kevin looks up from the latest issue of _The Blue and Gold_ (“ _‘_ Meat’ Miss Beazley, RHS’s Cafeteria Stalwart”). “Oh—the Blossom twins. Jason and Cheryl. You’ve met them, haven’t you?”

“No, I don’t think so? Introduce me?”

Kevin guffaws. “I don’t think Cheryl would even see me from way up there.” Veronica’s eyebrows incline. “On her high horse,” he clarifies.

“Kevin...”

“Oh no, no—I promise, it’s not worth the scalding.”

_Ah_ , Veronica realizes. _This_ is her challenge.

Finally. She’d thought this seemed too easy. 

  
  
  


Challenge it is, because when Veronica finally comes face-to-face with Cheryl Blossom at River Vixens try-outs, the squad captain and possible-despot hardly spares Veronica a glance, no matter how high her kicks soar, nor how crisply her cheers echo through the gymnasium. 

She nevertheless makes the team, and that’s what tells Veronica she’s still in the game.

  
  
  


Cheryl does not respond to any of Veronica’s efforts toward wooing her.

When Veronica proffers a box of Magnolia cupcakes fresh from the city to the cheer squad, Cheryl eyes them down the length of her aquiline nose.

“Gluten-free,” she says, before sharply ordering her Vixens into block-formation. 

Her hair nearly whips Veronica in the face, and the smell of fresh gardenia only feels like encouragement. 

  
  
  


Veronica tries Red Vines next.

They’re _red_ ; that has to count for something, even if this is just a screening of _The King and I_ at the drive-in. When Betty told her, over their partially-dissected sheep’s brain in biology, that she was organizing a “group-hang at the Twilight,” Veronica simply asked who had already RSVPed positively before quickly committing. 

Cheryl Blossom eyes the bag of red licorice that Veronica tilts her way invitingly, and daintily removes a single strand with her thumb and index finger.

Cheryl’s eyes watch Anna and the king dance as she chomps her treat, and Veronica feels her cheeks flush with accomplishment. 

Small victories, she tells herself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. 

  
  
  


Veronica’s not certain that Cheryl’s said more than two or three words directly to her. 

She’s been barked at (with passion, with _fire_ ) along with the rest of the squad to “Get in formation!” and “Fall in line, Vixens!” But she’s never, to her recollection, been the sole focus of Cheryl’s discerning brown eyes, nor caused her impeccably-lined lips to quirk at the corner, as she’d witnessed just once, when Betty—who seems to have special privileges by virtue of relation, however distant the Coopers are from the Blossoms—had grumbled under her breath something about Cheryl’s “tyrannical expectations.” _That_ had been quite a day. 

Veronica might’ve fallen asleep thinking about that small piece of Cheryl’s heart-shaped face that night. 

So when she’s unexpectedly the focus of Cheryl’s attention at the lunch table on a Thursday afternoon in November, she’s caught completely off guard. 

She’s skimming Dr. Flutesnoot’s comments on her bio quiz and ignoring both her spinach salad and Jughead’s rant about MLA-style, when an elegant _ahem_ sounds behind her. It’s not until the second _ahem_ that she turns to see Cheryl towering above her, hands on red-skirted hips.

“Hello, Veronica.”

“Hello, Cheryl.”

( _What’s happening?_ she wonders, but then Cheryl continues.)

“I’m having a few inner-circle Vixens—and Cousin Betty—over for manis, pedis, and blow-outs on Saturday night ahead of Sunday’s playoff game. Please arrive by eight-thirty.”

And then she’s gone, in a wave of—not gardenia this time; _tuberose?_

  
  
  


Come Saturday, Veronica finds herself holding her hands painstakingly still, as Josie paints her nails in alternating shades of blue and gold. Out of the corner of her eye, she spies Cheryl watching Midge, who wields a nail brush over her captain’s hands, like a hawk. 

Her nails are red, Veronica notices.

  
  
  


Veronica doesn’t sleep well on anything less than a very fine silk sheet or a high-thread count percale, and while the Blossom accommodations are undeniably fine, she tosses and turns until the breathing of her fellow Vixens mellows out, slow and steady. 

She huffs in frustration, and decides trying to sleep is fruitless. 

She wanders the halls of Thornhill until she finds a kitchen, deep in the bowels of the house. 

After a few minutes of searching through cabinets she finds a glass, and holds it under the tap. She’s gulped about half of it down before—

“What are you doing?”

She nearly chokes, and almost spills water onto her violet-striped silk pajamas. 

Cheryl stands next to the island, arms crossed over her own silk pajamas, red-striped. They make quite a pair, Veronica muses. 

Veronica shakes the half-empty glass at her. “Casing the joint for your Waterford.” She regards the glass in question. “Lalique?”

Cheryl shrugs. “We keep the good crystal in the butler’s pantry.” 

“Oh, of course,” Veronica teases, and were it not for the low light of the kitchen, she’d think she glimpsed it—that quirk in the corner of Cheryl’s mouth. _Did it happen? Had she missed it?_

Cheryl surveys the kitchen island, peers through the window over the sink, looks absolutely anywhere but toward Veronica—but then she’s standing right in front of her, and she’s reaching out and taking the crystal from Veronica’s hand, and placing it in the sink.

“Back to bed, we have an early start time, and I won’t be embarrassed in front of Baxter High by something as avoidable as dark circles under our eyes. Concealer can only do so much.”

She turns toward the door, and before Veronica can clear her head to follow, she feels herself shiver—as though Cheryl’s very nearness had brought warmth, and her absence had let the cold return.

  
  
  


The Bulldogs best the Ravens, and the Vixens retreat to their locker room to debrief and pack-up.

“Coming to Pop’s?” Betty inquires, and Veronica tells her she’ll be along shortly.

She waits for the Vixens to slowly trickle out, until she’s one of the last left.

Cheryl brushes her hair with her fingers, arranging it just so, gazing into her locker mirror until she deems some imperceptible, indistinguishable, minute alteration to have been enough. 

Veronica doesn’t notice it, but suddenly she’s right next to Cheryl’s locker, and _she’s_ the one who jumps when Cheryl slams it shut and spins to lean her shoulder against it, facing Veronica, conveying no shock at finding herself shadowed.

“Veronica,” she says in greeting. Her icy tone seems to Veronica to have near-imperceptibly thawed. 

Veronica raises an eyebrow and mirrors Cheryl’s posture, leaning against the lockers and crossing her arms across her chest. Her heart beats a little rapidly ( _huh_ , she thinks), but she knows herself; she’s got a good poker face. 

Cheryl narrows her eyes, rakes them up from the toes of Veronica’s heels to the pearls around her neck. Veronica stifles a shiver, but before she can say anything further—Cheryl’s stepped into her space, her hands are on Veronica’s arms, and her lips are on Veronica’s lips, and she’s kissing her. 

( _This is a good kiss_ , Veronica thinks briefly, before hardly thinking at all.)

When Cheryl finally pulls back, Veronica almost feels a little sad. But then—

“You can buy me a cherry phosphate,” Cheryl says, and then she grabs Veronica’s hand in hers, and pulls her through the locker room door, out into the crisp of a dry autumnal Sunday afternoon.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, the digital version of the zine can be found [here](https://gumroad.com/riverdalepridezine). I helped proof the final product and so as I person who read that zine cover-to-cover a number of times over, let me convey: it is _extremely_ good. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
